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Need a last second fill-in for your flag football team? Daunte Culpepper is available. Looking for a special someone to help light the candles at your son's bar mitzvah? Tim Hardaway is glad to be of service. In fact, if you're in the market for a professional athlete or celebrity for any occasion, there's no better place to go than Thuzio, the online marketplace connecting fans with their favorite superstars of past and present.

Started by former New York Giants running back Tiki Barber and entrepreneur Mark Gerson, Thuzio has taken a revolutionary step towards bridging the divide between celebrities and the general public. The company's value proposition is incredibly simple: create unprecedented access to athletes and celebrities through a single online platform and keep it affordable by using in-market talent.

"Thuzio, for the first time, offers a commercial access point for talent -- a place where the athlete has complete control over their profile (in terms of experiences, availability and pricing) -- and receives, in this trusted environment, all kinds of opportunities that were previously inaccessible or nonexistent," remarks Thuzio CEO Jared Augustine, one of the early executives at Seamless.com.

Thuzio offers fans the opportunity to interact with their favorite athletes, with packages ranging from $99 to as high as $5000.

By only offering bookings in local markets, where the majority of the players fans and potential customers are based, Thuzio can keep packages affordable while increasing volume significantly. In the first six months of the company's existence, the average booking price for a celebrity or athlete appearance was approximately $2,300, with some athletes receiving up to 15 more appearances in the last year than they had before joining Thuzio. Moreover, the early success has led to company to grow business at a rate of 20% a month, with just 150 athletes in the New York market at start-up to over 1000 in 8 U.S. markets in years time, with plans to expand to 12 by early 2014.

"From the standpoint of our talent, if something is local them, they're far more likely to do it," say's Thuzio co-founder Tiki Barber. "With time constraints around practice and workouts, its simply unrealistic to expect a professional athlete to fly around the country to do an appearance on a regular basis. But if there's an opportunity right down the street, it's almost a no-brainer," he adds.

Where did the idea from Thuzio come from?

"The most memorable gift I have ever given or received was a dinner for my father and me with Ralph Branca, Ten years later, we still talk about what we learned from Ralph -- his stories about playing with Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese, his reflections on the Shot Heard Round the World and much more," explains Gerson. "In my early discussions with Tiki, memories of that evening kept coming back -- as they resonated with similar experiences that Tiki and so many of his colleagues in sport had from the other side, as the talent. We realized how significant the opportunity to systematize and professionalize the creation of these opportunities and experiences could be, and decided to start Thuzio," he elaborates.

Traditionally, garnering off the field opportunities for athletes and celebrities was largely dependent on how much time their agents and managers wanted to investment into finding them such work. But with low margins due to relatively small value of such deals, few agents spend much on acquiring such opportunities for their clients. Yet by aggregating talent to a central marketplace, Thuzio was essentially able to flip the funnel and allow consumers to seek out such opportunities instead of the other way around.

"We knew there was a market for this activity, as I knew of so many transactions like those we would soon enable that involved me and many of my colleagues in sport. So there was a market -- but no marketplace, where people could see who was available for what activities and at what prices. We are creating that marketplace -- by partnering with players directly and through (especially in the case of current players) through their agents, who see us as partners who can help to provide valuable and enjoyable opportunities for their talent," "remarks Barber.

Thuzio's ultimate goal is to make fan interactions with athletes and celebrities available to everyone, not just those that can afford five figure speaking fees. The company took a major step in making that reality with the recent launch of its new mobile product, which allows fans to have their favorite athlete create a customized video message for just $99. The product has been so successful over the last few months, that it has ironically driven down the average transaction price on the website by some 25%, but has pushed total revenues to ever gaining heights.

The company plans on being in every major U.S. market within the next few years, as well as launch international operations in the near future. Thuzio plans on implementing a unique global tracking system that will let fans know when their favorite athlete may be traveling overseas and be available to make an appearance.

More significantly, Thuzio knows that it is providing a valuable service to many athletes who have spent two decades working on a skill (playing the sport) that is no longer financially sustaining. Thuzio provides athletes with opportunities that enable them to continue their work in the sport -- by connecting them with their admirers for a range of activities that seem to be enjoyed by everyone involved. And the customers seem to be responding accordingly.

"We want athletes to recognize the power of their brands, and to start building relationships and momentum for themselves while they're still playing," remarks Barber. "We’ve seen our talent get paid to have lunch with an executive, and next thing you know the executive is on the board for their charity. Those type of residual benefits are invaluable to an athlete trying to secure his post-playing career future."

Thuzio has plans to broaden beyond sports and into all other areas where talent can commercially interact with their admirers. In fact, just last weekend an attorney from Knoxville received what he called "the greatest gift ever" -- lunch with George Klein, who was Elvis Presley's close friend since their days together at Humes High School in Memphis.

Whether it's George Klein or George McGinnis, for the first time ever fans have the a readily accessible opportunity to hang out with their favorite stars thanks to Thuzio.